Days of Your Fathers Read online

  On four benches Danno saw prostrate bodies ending in heavy knee-high boots. On another was a shapeless mound of greasy shawls that finally resolved itself into a Polish woman, her small son and a bundle of pitiable possessions that she did not dare leave in the cabin. In the recess on one side of the steward’s pantry was a grave Jew in frock-coat and skull-cap staring at nothing and moving his lips, and in the other recess was a tall girl in a blue sweater and skirt with a red ribbon round her dark head. She was reading, and had bare, slim, impatient and rather furry legs which ended in sandals.

  ‘Good morning to you,’ said Danno to the barman.

  ‘Good morning, sir.’

  ‘Have you a beer, steward?’

  ‘Draught or bottled, sir?’

  ‘Now would ye believe that I must walk through six inches of raging ocean to quench my thirst when they have but to carry a barrel up a pair of ladders?’ asked Danno triumphantly. ‘I’ll have draught, me boy, and will you take one with me?’

  ‘Thank you, sir.’

  ‘And the lady, too. Will ye have a beer, ma’am, or a drop of what you fancy?’

  ‘Thank you,’ said the girl with a slight foreign accent, ‘but I don’t drink.’

  ‘Ah, and what would ye say to that?’ exclaimed Danno, unabashed.

  He turned to the old man on the other side.

  ‘Will your reverence take a beer?’ he asked.

  The Jew looked up, startled, and met Mr Flynn’s dancing eyes. What had been said to him he did not know, but, seeing that he had to deal with a rowdy, aggressive, powerful and incomprehensible Gentile, he assumed that it had been an insolence. He did not reply, and returned with dignity to his meditation.

  ‘By God, ’tis an unsociable ship!’ said Danno Flynn.

  ‘He didn’t understand you,’ explained the girl. ‘My father speaks hardly any English.’

  ‘Like me grandad,’ Danno replied. ‘But he’d understand if you asked him what he’d take – for it was not often he heard them words, he being the thirstiest man in Connemara. Beer?’ he asked very loudly. ‘Will ye take a beer?’

  He swayed to the motion of the ship, the surface of the beer in his glass forming an acute angle to the level of the floor. The girl’s father, overcome by this phenomenon and the effort of concentrating his thoughts on a wet and noisy barbarian, collapsed upon the table with a groan.

  Danno slid a hand under his shoulders and deposited him at full length on the bench with a rug under his head. His movements were so swift and confident that, though the girl had rushed simultaneously to her father, there was nothing for her to do but flutter anxiously around him.

  ‘What is it?’ she sobbed. ‘He is worn out. Is there a doctor? Get me a doctor!’

  ‘I am a doctor meself,’ said Danno, ‘so let you not be troubling your pretty head. ’Tis the sea-sickness, and that’s all. I should not have been disturbing his reverence the way he is, making meself the last straw that turns the camel’s stomach.’

  ‘Will it pass? Are you sure it will pass?’

  ‘He’ll be easy when ’tis calm,’ answered Danno positively. ‘Is it the first time he is at sea?’

  ‘The first time that either of us are at sea,’ she replied.

  ‘Ah, to be sure! You’ll come from a far country.’

  ‘From Austria.’

  ‘And have you famine there? Or would there be war with the English?’

  ‘Dear God! Don’t you read newspapers?’ she asked.

  ‘Every Saturday,’ said Danno unashamed. ‘But would I be troubling meself with all them queer people? But I remember now. Austria – ’tis where the Nazis murdered the little president and would not let him see a priest, and dancing in the streets they were, and holding up their hands to show the blood on them. Sure, it is no place for a woman.’

  ‘It is,’ she answered indignantly. ‘Vienna is a lovely town for any woman.’

  ‘Then why did ye leave it?’

  ‘I am a Jewess,’ she replied, trying to keep a neutral tone to her voice, and furious with herself for caring what tone of voice she used, for finding it necessary to avoid either fear or challenge or pride. To say ‘I am a Jewess’ brought into play a hundred complex humiliations, of which the strongest was resentment that there should be anything at all in so simple a statement worthy of such violent emotions.

  ‘Well, and aren’t they saying the Irish are the thirteenth tribe?’ asked Danno Flynn cordially. ‘Or is it the twelfth? God help me, I am always miscounting the tribes and the holy apostles. All I know, ’tis the thirteenth is unlucky.’

  The smell of the saloon and the strain of listening to a foreign dialect were too much for her.

  ‘Oh, please!’ she cried. ‘You will excuse me. I – I am tired!’

  She rushed into the open air. The wind picked up her slim, swaying body and carried it away.

  ‘To be sure, ’tis not all of us have voyaged to Liverpool with the cattle as I have meself,’ remarked Danno. ‘Will ye have a beer, steward?’

  The Alhaurin slid sideways down an invisible slope and recovered her balance with a lurch like that of a self-conscious drunk. A crate of bottles glided across the floor of the pantry, and the steward grabbed the edge of his sink with both hands. Danno Flynn, seeing the back of his neck turn from brown to green, gave up hope of further conversation and returned to his cabin in the first-class.

  Mr Flynn spent the following day drinking beer in the third-class saloon from eleven to one, and six to eleven. While the ship was in Lisbon and the bar closed, he slept it off; but when the steward, half-way down the Tagus, opened his hatch, he let in the upper half of Mr Flynn’s waiting body and began to serve his charges with Mr Flynn’s free drinks.

  The peasant immigrants did not worry themselves to account for the continual visitor. If, having a first-class ticket, he chose to drink in the third-class bar, they assumed – those of them who were intelligent enough to assume anything – that it was because the drinks were cheaper. To the Jews, however, he was a mystery. They could not understand why anyone should prefer the cheerless, reeking immigrant saloon to the luxury, envied and therefore exaggerated, of the first-class; but most of them, sitting in melancholy resignation before the punishment their God had inflicted on them, welcomed Mr Flynn as a comparatively pleasant chastisement. His only demand was that somebody should drink his beer and attempt to understand his conversation.

  The Austrian girl, Berta Feitel, was thoroughly puzzled by him. She was fascinated by his shimmer of charm, drunk or sober – it was too light-hearted a quality to be common among her own people or indeed among any city-dwellers – but his wild exuberance seemed to her unreal, a part acted for some purpose of his own. She longed for her father to come on deck. Having spent a wise and simple life between the schools and the synagogue, he had a peculiar gift of seeing to the heart of any human being, and he could have summed up Danno Flynn for her. But Mr Feitel was still in his bunk, continually sick though the sea was calm, and Berta had no wisdom to fall back on but the experience of her own agitated youth.

  When Mr Flynn was not present, he was the chief topic in the third-class quarters. Berta was supposed to be the authority on him, since she spoke good English and had always mixed freely with Gentiles. She could not always avoid being cross-examined.

  ‘Oy, Berta! What has he been telling you? A doctor? That man? Of course he is no doctor! Did he tell you so, Berta?’

  Her questioner laughed irritatingly, making a sound like fee-fee-fee through his little round mouth. He had a gross body, a pink and featureless face, and the habit of generally being right. She disliked him intensely – the more so, since it occurred to her that there was an air about doctors, Jewish or Gentile, that Mr Flynn certainly did not possess.

  ‘Why should he not be?’ asked a small dark chess-player, coming to the rescue. ‘He is an intellectual. I do not understand all he says, but he is an intellectual!’

  ‘That was what you said of the grocer on the corner,�
�� answered the fat man mercilessly. ‘And he kicked you, Jacob, scrubbing the pavement.’

  The chess-player sighed at this memory, and returned to his problem.

  ‘At any rate he has no prejudice,’ said Berta.

  ‘Ach, that is because you are a pretty girl!’ lisped the practical man. ‘He means you to trust him. He listens and overhears what we say. He makes us drunk. Jacob, he is paid to be here!’

  The chess-player looked up, startled and serious.

  ‘It is true,’ he said. ‘I will be careful. I will be careful.’

  The Jewish corner of the saloon became full of quick, restless movement. Some put their hands in their pockets to feel if letters were still there; some sighed, imperceptibly rocking their bodies; others glanced at the door. Doors were no longer innocent bits of wood for them. Bad news came through doors. Berta herself was affected. Not even on the high seas was one safe. Everywhere, everywhere there were spies.

  Five days of irrigation with beer quenched the drought in Danno Flynn’s interior. He continued to spend some hours a day in the third-class saloon and his hospitality was as promiscuous as ever; but he drank in half-pints instead of pints, his face was shaven, his moustache neatly clipped, and his body sportingly dressed.

  When one evening he turned up in a boiled shirt and dinner jacket, a hush descended upon the saloon. The peasants shuffled their preposterous boots, stared and breathed very loudly. Such raiment was connected in their minds with the President of the Republic, or a marriage, or the excitement of a travelling salesman; they expected Mr Flynn to unfurl a banner and pull a diamond ring or a bottle of medicine out of his pocket. Israel in exodus felt all its suspicions confirmed. He was rich. He had no good right to be there.

  The silence impressed even Danno. He was, for about the third time in his life, self-conscious. He had dressed himself up for a gala dinner in the first-class and saw no reason for changing merely because he craved a draught beer. He met Berta’s ironical eyes, and flushed. It occurred to him that he had been guilty of wanting to be admired, that he could, after all, have drunk whisky in his own smoking-room.

  ‘But why wouldn’t I show meself to the darling,’ argued Danno loudly to himself, ‘seeing she could know me for a hundred years and never see me in the like of these clothes again?’

  He drank a beer with the steward and departed hastily, wishing the saloon a noisy good-night.

  Meanwhile Berta had silently vanished into the night. She was filled with cold anger at his impudence in appearing amongst them with this bold admission that he belonged to another world; that he was not of them but had power over them. At the same time she knew that she herself was the cause; even the most rabid Nazi put on his best uniform when he had to deal with Jewish girls. It was the moment to ask questions, when she was at her coldest and he off his guard.

  Danno emerged from the severe cubical deck-house which contained the immigrants’ public rooms. The iron plates of the main deck and the tarpaulin-covered hatches were flooded with moonlight. The Alhaurin, at this level a ship rather than a floating hotel, swished through the calm water while a band faintly sounded from somewhere in the towering terraces of the first-class and a light flashed on the horizon, reminding the traveller that even in the wastes of the Atlantic were the Azores.

  Berta leaned over the rail, waiting for her prey and comparing herself to Judith before Holofernes. As the door of the saloon slammed, she turned and smiled invitingly at Danno.

  ‘How is your da?’ he asked.

  ‘Still sick. He cannot eat or get up.’

  ‘I’ll see him,’ said Danno.

  ‘It’s nothing,’ she answered swiftly. ‘It will pass. Stay here and talk to me.’

  A strand of her black hair, fragrant in spite of the saloon and the peasants and the paintwork of a stuffy cabin below the waterline, blew gently against his face.

  ‘What land is that?’ she asked, pointing to the light.

  ‘’Tis Africa,’ he replied, ‘with negro slaves holding up a jewel to you that you may stop and be the bride of their great king.’

  ‘I would rather be where I am,’ said Berta dreamily.

  Danno felt the wind cold against his unaccustomed shirt-front as two drops of sweat shot down his chest from hair to hair like the balls on a pin-table.

  ‘Then I would not be changing places with any king in the wide world,’ he said.

  He laid his hand over hers. It did not return his pressure, but remained warm and unresisting while Abraham looked down approvingly – or so Berta hoped – upon his handmaiden.

  ‘You must know all the lands we pass so well,’ she suggested, hoping to find out whether he was on regular duty with the line.

  ‘I was always a great reader,’ answered Danno cautiously, ‘and many’s the beating I had for it. If it was not Father Donnelly had the hide off me for not attending to my book, ’twas my Da for not attending to the sheep.’

  He told her a little of his boyhood in Connemara, of the green hills and white villages, of the glimpses of the Atlantic and the soft rain that drifted inland like smoke from the sea. As he talked, it seemed to her that her suspicions had been utterly foolish. This was the history of a David rather than a Holofernes. With the readiness of youth she swung to the other extreme, telling herself that the curse of her race was to suspect, always to suspect.

  ‘So that is why you came here, down to the third-class!’ she cried with a warmth that surprised him. ‘You have been poor. You like simple people – true people!’

  ‘And what more would I need to bring me here but the sight of your face?’ he answered.

  ‘But you didn’t know I was there. And sometimes – those first days – you did not speak to me.’

  ‘To be sure, I did not,’ he admitted penitently. ‘But ’twas the sorrow of my heart at leaving Eire and the thirst that was on me that would have floated the ship from under our feet. And, God help me, it was the barrel of beer that brought me to the third-class and no other thing at all.’

  ‘Have they no beer in the first-class?’ she asked.

  ‘Devil a drop that’s fit to drink!’

  It couldn’t be true. Dear God, what an easy little fool he must be thinking her! All her suspicions rushed back, now the harder to bear for her moment of tenderness towards him.

  ‘You expect me to believe that?’ she cried. ‘That we … cattle … down here can get something that you cannot?’

  Her face was drawn and her mobile mouth twitching with anger at her own treachery. Danno Flynn stared at the explosive young woman, his features showing a sudden and comical consciousness of guilt.

  ‘You cannot harm us!’ she stormed. ‘You will not be listened to, do you hear me? We are not afraid of you. Nothing can happen to us now, nothing any more. We – we snap our fingers!’

  She burst into tears and ran from him. Even the beating of her feet upon the deck was angry.

  ‘’Tis the long voyage,’ said Danno Flynn, ‘and a young girl is a chancy thing. I should not have been telling her that I came for the beer.’

  He climbed back to his own quarters and strolled into the smoking-room in the certainty of finding the ship’s doctor. Part of the girl’s unaccountable moodiness was due, he thought, to worry about her father. Mr Feitel ought to have been up and about long since, for the sea had been calm as a lake since they sailed from Lisbon.

  Dr Pulberry was in his usual chair and was, as usual, alone. His little red face and little white moustache were perched perkily upon the high butterfly collar of his mess uniform. His brusque and hearty manner did not gain for him all the free drinks that he felt to be his due; he accepted Mr Flynn’s offer of a whisky with gratitude, made a joke about an Irishman, and, finding it well received, became very communicative.

  ‘Yes, I’ve seen the old fellow,’ he said in answer to Danno’s questions. ‘I know those cases – have ’em every voyage. Nerves! Funk! No stamina! Goes on being sick because it’s less effort than exercising a littl
e will power!’

  Dr Pulberry, having retired from practice ten years since, considered that his job should be a sinecure. One patched up the crew. One discussed their ailments with the first-class passengers, especially the good-looking women. But one resented immigrants. At his age one resented them very strongly. If they didn’t have infectious diseases they had diseases of malnutrition; and if they didn’t have those they were seasick.

  ‘Cannot ye give him a pill?’ asked Danno.

  ‘The usual sedatives of course! Certainly! But they don’t stop him. I’ll try a better cure on him soon.’

  On his visit to the immigrant saloon the next morning Danno discovered that communication had become very difficult. Those passengers who had spoken English to him were absorbed in chess or meditation or excited arguments – which ceased when he drew near. Those who did speak to him, all of them fair-haired, spoke in tongues so utterly incomprehensible that Danno shouted back to them in Erse. This amusement, however, palled under the contemptuous gaze of Berta’s large, clear eyes. She ignored his enquiries about her father by replying that he was better and instantly returning to her book.

  Danno Flynn put a black curse upon the night that he had gone to the third-class in a dinner jacket, and passed two whole days moping in his own smoking-room and hanging over the rail for a sight of Berta as she lay peacefully on the hatch of the main deck.

  Whether it was to emphasize the difference between herself and the shapeless bundles of peasant women or whether because she knew Danno would be looking, she made a habit of taking the sun for an hour a day in a yellow swimming-suit. This delightful sight led to Dr Pulberry and other pillars of the bar deserting their usual chairs for chairs on the verandah.

  ‘Now I know why you went slumming! Pretty, eh?’ said the doctor, digging Danno in the ribs.